Less than 96 hours after TMZ.com published a racist and hate-filled audio recording between Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his then-girlfriend V. Stiviano, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suspended Sterling from any and all NBA activities for life; fined Sterling $2.5 million; and asked the other 29 NBA owners to force a sale of the Clippers. When asked at his press conference what authority he had to force Sterling to sell the team, Silver replied:

The owners have the authority subject to three quarters vote of the ownership group, of the partners, to remove him as an owner.

Silver didn’t go into specifics, and when asked questions about his authority to suspend Sterling for life and impose a $2.5 million fine, he replied:

I’ll let the lawyers lay out for you the specific provisions of our constitution. Let’s just leave it that we have the authority to act as I’ve recommended.

A few hours later, the NBA made its Constitution and By-Laws available to the media through the league’s media center website. Deadspin, among others, published the document in full and provided a link for those of us who aren’t NBA media members.

So let’s take a  look at Silver’s authority.

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The Houston Astros added outfielder George Springer to their major league roster on Tuesday night and batted him second in the lineup in their game on Wednesday against the Kansas City Royals. Springer had an infield hit in five at-bats plus a walk in his debut.

Astros fans — indeed, fans of young baseball talent — have been pining for Springer’s call up since last season when he batted .301/.411/.600 in 589 plate appearances with 37 home runs and 45 stolen bases between Triple-A and Double-A. That followed his successful 2012 campaign in Double-A and high Single-A, when he posted a .302/.383/.526 line in 581 plate appearances. In February, Baseball America ranked Springer as the 18th best prospect. My colleague Marc Hulet put Springer at No. 14 on his Top 100 prospect list.

Yet Springer remained in the minors, without even a whiff of the big leagues last September, when the Astros expanded their roster. And he was sent back to Triple-A during spring training, with no place on Houston’s 40-man.

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Yesterday, I classified every contract for a position player currently on a 40-man roster. Today we turn our attention to the pitchers.

As of Sunday night, April 6th, there were 613 pitchers on a 40-man roster. Many pitchers with season-long injuries are on their team’s 60-day disabled list and have been moved off the 40-man roster. This includes Matt Harvey, Patrick Corbin, Derek Holland and Cory Luebke, to name a few. You won’t see those names below and I have not included them in the 612-pitcher total.

Before we get to the tables, here are the highlights:
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In February, I estimated each team’s likely Opening Day payroll and broke down each payroll into discreet parts: the percentage of payroll that would be spent on the starting rotation, starting lineup, bullpen and bench. If you missed those posts, you can find them here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Today, we take a step back and look at how each team arrived at the position-player portion of their current 40-man rosters. What type of contract does each position player have? Is he a pre-arbitration player going year-to-year? Is he a pre-arbitration player with a contract? An arbitration-year player with an extension into free agency? A free agent with his old team or a new team? And so on.

This was a substantial undertaking, as there were 577 position players on a 40-man roster as of Sunday night, April 6th. Later this week, I’ll roll out a similar post on pitchers.

Below you will find 30 tables, one for each team, with a list of the position players on the 40-man roster and a description of each player’s current contract.

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Two years after signing a new local television contract with Fox Sports San Diego, the Padres will have their games carried by all the major cable and satellite operators in the team’s viewing area. The same cannot be said for the new Dodgers network called SportsNetLA, or for the year-old Comcast SportsNet Houston, which broadcasts Astros games.

In their inaugural season with FSSD in 2012, Padres games were broadcast only on Cox Cable and DirecTV. Last season, DISH Network and AT&T U-verse came onboard, which still left Time Warner Cable customers — more than 180,000 households or approximately 40% of the market — without access to the Padres on TV. TWC finally cut a deal with FSSD last month. Come Opening Day, anyone in San Diego or Hawaii with service from Cox, DirecTV, DISH, AT&T U-verse or TWC will be able to watch Padres games.

FSSD’s slow rollout reflects the economic realities of sports on TV. Advertisers love live, DVR-proof programming that’s watched by 18-to-45-year-old men, and they spend wildly on commercials during those programs. Sports networks — regional and national — see the money the advertising generates and bid obscence amounts for the broadcast rights. But the ad money isn’t nearly enough to cover the fees paid to the leagues and teams, and still turn a profit. For that, the networks turn to the cable and satellite operators that would like to offer the sports programming to their customers. The two sides negotiate the carriage fee — the price the cable and satellite operators will pay, per customer, in order to “carry” network as part of its sports programming packages.

The Padres-FSSD contract is valued in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, putting average annual payments to the Padres in the $50 million to $75 million range. It’s thought the initial payment for 2012 was closer to $30 million. Before the 2012 season, Cox and DirecTV reportedly agreed to pay FSSD $5 per subscriber, but TWC, AT&T and DISH balked at that fee, leading to the impasse. It is not clear whether the holdouts eventually came around to a $5 per subscriber fee or if FSSD agreed to a lower fee to get those cable and satellite operators to join on.

The battle over carriage fees isn’t limited to regional sports networks, as I explained in this post last July. But when it comes to local sports programming, cable and satellite operators are digging deep — beyond the ratings reported by Nielsen — to understand who watches the local sports teams, when and for how long. Based on that information, many pay-TV providers simply have decided that paying carriage fees in the range of $5 per subscriber doesn’t make financial sense for them or for their customers.

SportsNet LA launched in February with around-the-clock Dodgers programming, but only customers with TWC or Bright House can view the network in their homes. Every other cable and satellite operator in the Los Angeles market has balked at the network’s carriage fee demand. And TWC hardly counts as an arms-length agreement, as it is the Dodgers’ broadcast partner in SportsNet LA. Indeed, TWC will essentially pay itself the carriage fee for SportsNet LA, and then pay the Dodgers their monthly rights fee as part of the 25-year, $8.3 billion megadeal. TWC CEO Rob Marcus apparently isn’t worried. He recently told a media conference that Opening Day has a way of making these deals shake out.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, DirecTV is pushing for an a la carte pay structure with SportsNet LA; that is, DirecTV will pay the carriage fee only for those customers who specifically subscribe to the network. The Dodgers have rejected that proposal, and for good reason. The economics of their deal don’t make sense if customers can pick and choose whether to pay for the network.

Bad economics are precisely what unfolded in Houston, where the Astros are embroiled in several lawsuits and a bankruptcy proceeding involving CSN Houston and the Astros’ broadcast rights. I explained what led to the legal mess in this post from last November. In short, CSN Houston couldn’t reach carriage fee deals with any cable or satellite provider other than Comcast. Disputes arose between and among Comcast, the Astros and the Houston Rockets — which collectively own CSN Houston — over how to negotiate the carriage fee deals and at what price. Comcast forced the parties into bankruptcy court. The Astros sued former owner Drayton McLane, claiming he misled new owner Jim Crane on the financial viability of the new network. Four months later, nothing’s been resolved.

There is a glimmer of hope for Astros fans, though. The Houston Chronicle reported this week the Astros are hoping to make their games available in the Houston area through the MLB Extra Innings Package. Typically, local games are blacked out on Extra Innings or MLB.tv, as a way of protecting the regional sports networks’ economic interests (often called their monopoly). It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which CSN Houston willingly allows games to be broadcast on Extra Innings, as that would further undercut the little leverage the network has in trying to reach carriage deals and work its way out of bankruptcy.

At some point, you’d think sports networks would stop dolling out huge rights fee deals.

In Part One of this series, published yesterday, I ranked the projected 2014 Opening Day payrolls, estimated the number of pre-arbitration players on each Opening Day roster, and calculated the percentage of each team’s payroll attributed to the highest paid player.

Today, in Part Two, I break down the payrolls even further, into four component parts: the starting rotation, the starting lineup, the bullpen and the bench. In so doing, I made a judgment on who was likely to slot into these roles to start the season. FanGraphs’ Depth Charts and MLB Depth Charts were my go-to sources, but I made a deliberate decision to exclude all non-roster invitees from Opening Day rosters, as those players’ salaries aren’t included on Cot’s Contracts. Invariably, some of my judgment calls will be wrong. Feel free to note those in the comments, as many did yesterday in Part One.

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Spring training is in full gear. Opening Day — Australia style — is 26 days away. Several free agents still hoping for major-league deals remain unsigned, most notably Stephen Drew, Kendrys Morales and Ervin Santana. They each received a qualifying offer from their last team, turned it down, and now sit waiting for a new team to pay them and agree to give up a draft pick. For the most part, though, teams have done the hard work to construct their Opening Day rosters, save for the usual spring training competitions for bench positions and the back end of the bullpen.

Combined, teams have committed more than $3 billion in salary for the 2014 season. The top spender is the Los Angeles Dodgers, at more than $220 million. The most frugal is the Miami Marlins, with approximately $42.5 million in salary obligations.

Every team, no matter the payroll, has to make decisions about how to spend the money allocated for player salaries. We wanted to know about those decisions. What percentage of a team’s payroll is spent on the highest-paid player? The starting rotations? The starting position players? The bullpen? The bench? How many pre-arbitration eligible players likely will be on each team’s Opening Day roster? Do big spending teams allocate their payroll in a different way than smaller spending team? If so, how? And so on.

We will answer those questions in a series of posts.

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Major League Baseball may still enjoy immunity from federal antitrust laws, but that immunity doesn’t mean the league or its teams can ignore federal and state laws that require employees be paid a minimum wage.

So say several lawsuits and other legal actions filed against MLB and several teams in the last year. The latest lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in San Francisco, could significantly change the economics of the league were it to succeed. In that case, three former minor league players filed a complaint against MLB, the Giants, Marlins and Royals on behalf of 6,000 current and former minor leaguers claiming that minor league salaries violate federal and state wage and hour laws.

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Much of my offseason writing on this site focused on the legal proceedings involving Major League Baseball, partly because MLB is embroiled in quite a few lawsuits, and partly because I try to stick to the advice: “Write what you know.” But as spring training kicks in to gear next week, and then the season in late March, I hope (I really, really hope) to spend more time on interesting baseball stories and less time on the intricacies of the Joint Drug Agreement and federal antitrust law.

Call me a dreamer.

In any event, there have been a few recent developments in MLB-related legal matters; perhaps not significant enough to warrant their own post, but important enough to mention as part of this legal roundup. When readers ask me on Twitter, “Hey, what’s happening with such-and-such lawsuit,” I’ll be able to send them a link to this article. At least for a while.

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Spring training is just around the corner. (Finally! At long last! Hallelujah!) Pitchers and catchers for the Diamondbacks and Dodgers report on Feb. 6 and Feb. 8, respectively, as those two teams get ready to open the season in Australia on Mar. 22. All other pitchers and catchers report the week of Feb. 10. It’s not just the players and coaches who need to practice for the season, though. Marketing and ticket sales representatives need to get in shape, too. So do the fans.

Which brings us to the season of Fan Fests and Caravans. Fan Fests are typically one, two, or three-day public events sponsored by teams, at which fans have the opportunity to talk directly to players, coaches and team executives; wait in long lines for autographs; check out the latest team gear and merchandise; and buy tickets for the upcoming season. Caravans take players and coaches on the road to the fans.

Most MLB teams host some kind of come-one, come-all Fan Fest, either at the ballpark, or a hotel or convention center nearby. Those teams with fan bases spread throughout a state or several states also conduct Caravans. Some do both.

But not all teams. The Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Angels and Marlins will not be hosting any type of public, fans-meet-players event before the 2014 season starts.  One of those teams is not like the others. Or is it two teams? More on that later.

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